Zebedee Development Weeks 4 & 5

Howdy Folks !

At this stage of Development its more trial and error than anything else. You could spend hours doing a tutorial on a piece of work and for it to simply fail and not work. .. Either that or the software your using crashes and bugs out. This will happen alot in the future.

Its time to start producing things for the levels .. and the levels themselves reckon we should have another 3 weeks and the main parts should be finalised. Little added touches can come later on if there’s time!.  If we have nice vast levels for our players to experience everything else can almost become secondary.

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Since last few weeks Amanda managed to import that waterfall feature she was wanting so badly. She learned that instead of copying and pasting from the unreal engine’s pre made project she had to migrate it. This was a useful lesson which we learned as it stops bad things form happening ,, or not happening in this case..

Andrew also continued on his desert level and has also been helping out on the paperwork. Giving us a head start in that front.

My self ( Ricky) have been dwelling into almost everything. I haven’t been well in resent weeks …”( 1…2…3.. Aww)”. Particularity week 4 . So during that week i did simple tutorials as my attention span was shorter than flee with ADHD.

I tried creating a a start up movie for before the game. Wasting an hour or 2 for it not to work… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdHvWCDHLoc&feature=youtu.be

I then also had a play about with painting textures within Unreal Engine.

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Unreal Engine 4: Created a material blend and then painted it to the landscape. By Ricky Steven

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What you see here is a very ‘shoddy’ looking landscape. Which with the material blend I created i have painted onto that landscape and if you look closely at some parts it does actually blend together. The material blend I created featured a texture for rocks,dirt/gravel,grass and snow.

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And after a very slight recovery ‘cough’,’cough’ I then begun my level creation. For those who haven’t been following along just to quickly bring you up to speed the last few weeks i have been creating blue prints for the character with Unreal Engine and creating assets.

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Unreal Engine 4: Landscapes By Ricky Steven

As you will see i am going for an alien-like looking planet. The design Document which we made has made it clear our Target Audience is kids and the younger ages so I feel that that if it was different from earth type landscapes it would capture their imaginations more.

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My vision for this for the character to walk down a natural walkway down towards the lake. I will also be adding foliage (trees,grass) later on and adding in atmospheric glows and mists. The levels very big and a rule of law is that something must happen every 30 seconds within a game or movie. So I was thinking of adding simple A.I in like butterflies and birds. I would also like to implement a stream coming from  cave and into the lake. The green which you see in the pictures was just a basic material i used to make it look like something. I was thinking along the lines of a purple/blue terrain to make it more alien like. Or at least the mountains that way.

Bellow are exaggerated examples of alien like colours.

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Maya 2015 Character creation By Ricky Steven

I tried to dive in and create a character. As a complete noob and with only reference images of generic aliens i think making Zebedee is going to be tough, In actual fact i know it will be tough.

So following a tutorial which lasts roughly and hour means about 2 hours of work. Minimum.

As you will see from the images i used a reference on 3 sides and made a basic generic human shape,. The plan is now that the shapes there i can now go in a n refine touches and then do the rigging for making him move. Obviously this takes vast amount of time so remain patient and don’t laugh to much at my poor modelling skills which will unravel in due course of this semester.

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Hopefully you can see that there is a basic alien like figure which i can now expand on. But overall we feel like the project is coming along nicely. The fail safe though for the deadline is to use the standard character that unreal engine supplies for our project. We can always implement later after UWS is done with.

Thats all for this blog just now , more to follow on next week with updated maps and character models.

thanks for reading and a special thanks from Zebs !

Zebedee – Development Week 3

Howdy folks!

Yet another busy week Learning , creating and doing other classes at UWS ..”Annoyingly” participating in other classes should I say. But that’s enough moaning for now!.

To recap ?.

Paperwork was ,,,,,, blahh boring ! You’ll never have to really hear about that. Don’t worry ! This is what helps me nap on a Wednesday afternoon .

Last week Amanda & Andrew Worked on their levels – To be more specific they learned how to craft landscape and watch alot of tutorials(tuts).

These are there level designs … Absolutely Beautiful . mine ( Rickys ) Will be shown soon , You can count on that !.

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The reason I haven’t yet for those not following or just new Last week I focused on learning Maya 2015 and created some assets, and also made the character move and become controllable via game-pad and few other bits and bobs.  If you look at the last blog you’ll see I uploaded screen shots of my work and explained a little of what’s going on.

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This week Amanda and Andrew are still focusing on their levels and will continue to do so.  They also plan on making in-game assets like fruit for Zebedee , trees and more rock features that sort of thing. Andrew had chosen to do the desert/sand level as he explains he has some good ideas for it .  The groups idea in this was for there to be an old ruin or pyramid . Amanda grabbed the forest level as she has a very elaborate vision and a slight obsession with making a waterfall and this leaves Ricky with the mountain level. This is where I shared a vision of a cave feature and a big lake/loch feature also.

Hopefully I can share some screen shots of their work soon with you guys so yous can get a real visual look.

Ricky Followed on where he left off last week and completed the character movement controls and a little more. As well as doing more tutorials in Maya 2015 for the mock spaceship.

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Unreal Engine 4 tutorials: Gamepad input, Punching, and Dust Particles Ricky Steven 

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This week Ricky managed to get the Gamepad working (Xbox/Playstation/pluginplay). And also now has the character jumping nicely. This is also mobile compatible

He implemented a punching movement which involved more animation using persona and rigging it up with the blueprints. The tricky part which happened here was if you punched first then moved the character glided, so after following along on the tutorials they offered a solution to counter it . If there is an object with physics enabled the character can punch it around like the purple ball you will see in a later screen capture.

Ricky Also added in a particle effect so when eh moves the character runs it looks like dust is emitted. This was done within the persona.

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A way to do this is to do it in where you animate and when it looks like the characters foot touches the ground you can add in the event for a particle or sound. The default for this is pretty cool as its explosions.. So when your run around its like your on a mine field. But as for the pictures you see is where the particle for dust is manipulated in-which in this case it was made  look like much less  of it than the default. Also the spectacular was taking away to make it look more darker with no shine.

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Unreal Engine 4 tutorials , Extra work: New Level, landscape Tuts and intro movie  Ricky Steven 

The extra work means that more was done than expected mainly because of time needed for other classes at UWS or Work. So its never planned to do so but if it can be done we will desperately need it.

We now know a method of changing levels , this way which was tried was to basically work if you touch an actor. In this case the actor is placed in a doorway and the blueprint is very simple its basic speech is if touching go to here, ” Theres the purple ball i told yous about!”

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Ricky also had a little crack at playing with the level design. the images which are supplied show it was a little mess around and they ain’t pretty that’s for sure. But the lesson learned here was roughly shaping a landscape and how to make materials work for the paint tool.

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The blueprints picture has the 3 textures that were used: Rock, Dirt/Gravel and Grass. They are plugged into a blend which creates a new material.

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And lastly on the Unreal Engine Front for this week a Intro movie was made and implemented.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTmrw35RL7Y&feature=youtu.be]

DNA Games is the name of Rickys Facebook and Twitter relating to games where Zebedee is promoted and shared,

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Maya 2015 tutorials : First Attempt at a simple ship prototype Ricky Steven 

The following screen captures show the progression of what Ricky started with and ended with. You can laugh al you wish and make jokes , we sure did but remember this is the first attempt to have a basic ship in place within the game.

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A tutorial was followed and basically you start off with a square and keep extruding faces , over and over and over and again and so on until you have a very rough shape like a cardboard spaceship and then move edges and lastly press smooth about 4/5 times.

This is where I leave yous , More to follow next week thanks for reading and a bye from us and Zebedee !

Zebedee Development Week 1 & 2

Alrite Boys and Girls welcome back!.

The first 12 blogs were the planning stages for Zebedee, now its time to get stuck in and create him and his endeavours.

Its great to be back first of but the realism of our task is now more daunting than ever. But if that means throwing our life’s away for 12 weeks to try our best to have something remotely similar to our concept then we are prepared for that !

This Blog has been Bundled together for the first two weeks.  Simply due to the fact that over the Festive –  mid January we all had other projects and things going on and by the time they were finished we all had a break for a week or so. This meant that we had to go over basic Tutorials to familiarise ourself’s with the software’s that we need.

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Maya 2015 tutorials : Creating Basic Shapes ,Rocks, Create and flags by Ricky Steven 

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Although the rocks are really primitive its enough for us to grasp the feel of using Maya 2015. As you can see from the gallery we can mould them into any shape we want or need. To make the texturing better however it has to be textured twice. The second being a bumpmap , Basically giving it a rough 3d effect as without doing that the rocks look flat.   Very poor quality “snapchat” videos of the moving flags.

 http://youtu.be/yXlZhjJVNhs    http://youtu.be/l1Q9iK4l2aU

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Unreal Engine 4 tutorials: Character import,Animation sets, Movement, and Controls by Ricky Steven 

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This is the tutorial that you would follow from the Unreal Engine website or there YouTube.

The first steps were importing there FBX files. The only tricky bit about this is the order you do it i.e. having the skeleton FBX in-place first.

The inputs where added – for gamepads , mouse and keyboard. This was very simple but its later on where it gets wired up.

Then a simple metallic material to give him colour. Purple was chosen to keep in with the Zebedee vibe.

The blend space was created. – This is where you have the character switch from being idle to walking to running so its fluent.  This is done in persona mode within Unreal and you can add sound effects for foot steps and particle effects in here.

After this the animation blue prints were made. These are made via making a state machine , which basically makes what if statements to determine if the character is walking , or jumping.. For instance if he is still jumping then loop the jump mid animation and then play jump end when he’s about to land . This is done with boolean and timed enabled variables.

When the State Machine has been blueprinted you then do Animation Graphs to hook them together to get them actually working at the appropriate times and events they should.

The last tutorial That was done was hooking up the controls for the character within blueprint and assign a camera behind the character.  And after doing a play test it all worked the character that I had imported and animated was running about and jumping.

This is the Tutorial list that has been followed. By next week the rest will be completed.

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The main goal from The Treasure Hunters is to create and make almost everything by ourself. Thus why the making of the models for rocks and chests. We can’t announce just yet our time lines for the levels and Zebedee models but if you follow week by week you can see the game slowly unfold.

Thanks from Zebs 😀

Zebedee Week 12

Well guys the Presentation was a success!

 

The Lecturer seemed to have liked it, and if I do say so my self was very beautifully made. The though process behind it was a simple .. who is he .. why is he there .. what does he do .. competitors .. blah blah blah that’s not important just now as the GDD will be realised and so will the PowerPoint at the end.

But amongst this good news the sad news is Zebedee will be going to sleep for  a short while…. Until next semester when we create him and the planet in-which he is doomed on!

If any developments are made , notifications or any other related dribble , be sure that we will post and let yous know ..

Thanks for reading so far guys the excitements just begun in our eyes though!

Zebedeee would like to say …..

 

01001101 01100101 01110010 01110010 01111001 00100000 01011000 01101101 01100001 01110011 00100000

AND A

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01001110 01100101 01110111 00100000 01111001 01100101 01100001 01110010 00100000

Merry Xmas & a Happy New year !

Thanks for reading guys we’ll be sure to see yous in the new year with more Zebedee !!! and a special thanks From Ricky , Amanda and Andrew !!

Zebedee Week 11

Howdy !

 

This week there has been a big scramble to Finnish off the game design document. The groups been slowly picking away at it , but due to other classes its not been as straight forward as to just finishing it off.

But the GDD is now complete , everything is updated the website will now continue after the Festive period and will be updated since there was problems with it since week 5 or so and we will be re-homing either under the Zebedee Treasure hunter banner or that of DNA Games.

This was the last class as the next is the build up to our pitch to our lecturer. So this week we have been looking and thinking what we could put in the presentation. So that’s pretty much been the thought process this week as Ricky will create the Power Point and Amanda will create the prototype level and Andrew will beef up the GDD.

after this the group will part ways for a short time to focus on there flash animation project that’s due to be in on January (FLASH IS DEAD).

Thats all for now until next week where the presentation is due … wish us Luck !

 

 

Zebedee Week 10

howdy folks,

 

So this is a first concepts and mood boards for  of our companion to Zebedee , his name is Sphero and he is an A.I. worked by Ricky. The idea is to create a simple shaped character that will be an A.I or a robotic system which helps the player when needed. This leaves many possibility’s of what we can do if we manage to have time and achieve our goals by adding in features to this Sphero character.

Moods first then our mock first draft concepts. We feel this will ad depth to the game and make Zebedee little less lonely.

 

As well as thoughts to more characters and the possibility of bad guys or at least an thought of an simple enemy being added if there’s time.  The level prototype which Amanda has been making for our pitch as being coming along nicely and hopefully wee will have some  screen shots to show you guys soon.

The level will be very basic but we will talk through it to explain what were looking for. And what features we can have and will implement . Things like water , over exaggerated trees and leaves for Zebedee to jump on and so on.

Thats all for now more to follow next week

Zebedee – Week 8

howdy ,

 

In all truth not much happened in this weeks adventure of creating Zebs .

As there was an assessment due this week which unfortunately  took over our lives until near death.

We did how ever manage to do some story boards of an cinematic entrance and discuss the level features in more detail. But due to poor upload quaility there not worth showing so this week I shall show the winning Logo , and some more concepts made by Ricky

Ricky Has also created the Facebook page for Zebedee the Explorer rather than promoting it solely through the DNA Games page.

There has been some trouble with the website hosting and has temporary been shut down. This will be the case for a few weeks possibly until the second semester depending on how soon it can be fixed.

more to follow soon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zebedee – week 7

howdy

 

This week our team have being doing tutorials more tutorials  on Maya and Unreal Engine. just to help further our knowledge and get a head start to knowing the simple basics that are required for creating assets and levels.

We are learning the basics of these to create our character and level for him to interact with and move around as you would have guessed. Auto desk Maya 2015 is also free for students for 3 years if you apply via there website.

 

We aim to have our first mock level produced by the end of week 11 so we can have a visual response to our pitch to our lecturer.

Ricky has came up with the following mood boards for levels inspirations.

Desert , Mountain and forest also in ruins forms. The stand stones are just an idea for way points for players if need be or if we want to implement it.

Although most features will still be useless like actual interaction with events it will be a good base for our demo in week 12 in-which we will pitch our game to our Lecturer .

This week was mostly spent on tutorials and speaking about the pitch as well as continual work on the GDD as that is slowly becoming the more propagandist task.

 

 

more to follow

 

Zebedee – Concept’s week 5

This week wee will be focusing on the design of the game in terms of how its played , navigated and completed. We also spoke about and came up with ideas how some assets would look.

Zebedee will have his engine parts to find but also throughout the game will be hidden talismans. The way in which he can gain them is by completing tasks in either a certain order or in the time frame. If he does this then he then gains way to the area or room where is engine part will be. The other goal to make the game challenging will be to have Zebedee make timely jumps to make it across different terrains and features which could be deadly!

If Zebedee is injured then he can eat fruits that will heal him. The absolute dream and  aim would be to have some sort of enemy within the game but as were dwelling into the unknown we are aiming to keep it simple.

The software which we have chosen and need has been identified  and put within our GDD which we will release when its finished ! most of which is solely done by Ricky

a’ll leave you with a few sketchs by Ricky on ideas that have popped into one of our devs minds on writing , ships and of course Zebedee ( very rough and sketchy !) and also our logo for the treasurer hunters .. the best one that people suggest will be the one we use (made by Ricky of DNA games)

Thanks for reading , more to follow this week !

 

Zebedee – Story and ideas – wk3

This week we narrowed down what Zebedee could be , where he is from and what is his goal.

We like the idea of Zebedee of being an alien or a fluffy monster who either has to gather things or collect things before he heads back home. The main aspect of him and the game is to innocent like behavior and look for children to take a  liking to him.

The one we like the best is that Zebedee is an Alien explorer. He is a friendly character from the planet Ichuk.  Who was sent an unknown region of the galaxy. He stumbles across an uncharted planet which he ventures of to explorer . As he enters the atmosphere there was a engine malfunction and parts started to explode and strip off.  He then crash lands , and has to gather his engine parts to repair his ship to enable him to return home to his family. He remains calm and seems very intrigued by the seemingly  uninhabited planet.

Academic Purposes !

To gather all the parts we plan to have Zebedee to solve puzzles , fetching quests and explore the planet to find them all.  He will have to do his exhibition over various locations such as : a desert , a mountainous region and a forest. These could add either a slight challenge to the game or just be very ascetically pleasing.

The game engine we have definitely narrowed down for Unreal and either version  3 or 4 . The university seem to not doing very much to be obtaining the free software available to them which is just silly. Academic institutions are allowed the software for free so if your involved in games I suggest you have a look at their website for details.

We are willing to pay the subscription our self’s but we can get it for free so … still waiting on that front.

The character will be developed on Maya and imported in to the game.

academic purposes !

As in terms of competitors we feel the game would be like a friendlier Tomb Raider But Zebedee is far more sexier. But with the aspects of collecting things in a child friendly manor can be compared to many games  like Spyro , The Mario universe but with a nicer nature to an open level with quests and puzzles.

The game would be a PG and require 3+ if it were to be developed further onto the market. The ideal Target audience would be for the ages around 6-12 and generally for kids and maybe slightly into the girls side of the market. Though the game is uni-sexual and we would love all ages and genders to Explore with Zebedee !

Well thats all for now , more to follow next week!